Free The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark Page A

unforeseen, exotic, intellectual, yet
clearly available treasure. He holds on to her hand as if he was no fool, after
all. ‘Lady, I’m taking you to your hotel in the car. I couldn’t let you go out
into all this confusion. You’ll never get a bus, not for hours. A taxi, never.
The students, we have the students only to thank.’ And he calls sharply to the
apprentice to bring out his car. The boy goes over to a brown Volkswagen. ‘The
Fiat!’ bellows his employer, whereupon the apprentice moves to a dusty cream-coloured
Fiat 125, passes a duster over the outside of the windscreen, gets into it and
starts to manoeuvre it forward to the main ramp.
    Lise
pulls away her hand and protests. ‘Look, I’ve got a date. I’m late for it
already. I’m sorry, but I can’t accept your kind offer.’ She looks out at the
mass of slowly-moving traffic, the queues waiting at the bus-stops, and says, ‘I’ll
have to walk. I know my way.
    ‘Lady,’
he says, ‘no argument. It’s my pleasure.’ And he draws her to the car where the
apprentice is now waiting with the door open for her.
    ‘I
really don’t know you,’ Lise says.
    ‘I’m
Carlo,’ says the man, urging her inside and shutting the door. He gives the
grinning apprentice a push that might mean anything, goes round to the other
door, and drives slowly towards the street, slowly and carefully finding a gap
in the line of traffic, working his way in to the gap, blocking the oncoming
vehicles for a while until finally he joins the stream.
    It is
also getting dark, as big Carlo’s car alternately edges and spurts along the
traffic, Carlo meanwhile denouncing the students and the police for causing the
chaos. When they come at last to a clear stretch Carlo says, ‘My wife I think
is no good. I heard her on the telephone and she didn’t think I was in the
house. I heard.’
    ‘You
must understand,’ Lise says, ‘that anything at all that is overheard when the
speaker doesn’t know you’re listening takes on a serious note. It always sounds
far worse than their actual intentions are.
    ‘This
was bad,’ mutters Carlo. ‘It’s a man. A second cousin of hers. I made a big
trouble for her that night, I can tell you. But she denied it. How could she
deny it? I heard it.’
    ‘If you
imagine,’ Lise says, ‘that you are justifying any anticipations you may have
with regards to me, you’re mistaken. You can drop me off here, if you like.
Otherwise, you can come and buy me a drink at the Hilton Hotel, and then it’s
good night. A soft drink. I don’t take alcohol. I’ve got a date that I’m late
for already.’
    ‘We go
out of town a little way,’ says Carlo. ‘I know a place. I brought the Fiat, did
you see? The front seats fold back. Make you comfortable.’
    ‘Stop
at once,’ Lise says. ‘Or I put my head out of the window and yell for help. I
don’t want sex with you. I’m not interested in sex. I’ve got other interests
and as a matter of fact I’ve got something on my mind that’s got to be done. I’m
telling you to stop.’ She grabs the wheel and tries to guide it into the curb.
    ‘All
right, all right,’ he says, regaining control of the car which has swerved a
little with Lise’s interference. ‘All right. I’m taking you to the Hilton.’
    ‘It
doesn’t look like the Hilton road to me,’ Lise says. The traffic lights ahead
are red but as there is very little traffic about on this dark, wide
residential boulevard, he chances it and skims across. Lise puts her head out
of the window and yells for help.
    He
pulls up at last in a side lane where, back from the road, there are the lights
of two small villas; beyond that the road is a mass of stony crevices. He
embraces her and kisses her mightily while she kicks him and tries to push him
off, gurgling her protests. When he stops for breath he says, ‘Now we put back
the seats and do it properly.’ But already she has jumped out of the car and
has started running towards the gate of